1) Field of Invention
This invention relates to role-playing, board, and miniature-based games in particular. It also relates to any simulation requiring miniatures.
2) Discussion of Related Art
Miniatures are game pieces shaped to represent creatures or objects. Chess pieces, civil war miniatures, and plastic army men are common examples. Games that employ such miniatures often include a set of rules that assign each piece particular properties that are relevant to the rules. Traditionally, the properties are kept track of on one or more pieces of paper. When a couple miniatures are used in a game, each with different properties, keeping track of which miniature has which properties can become confusing. Writing on paper must be related to the appearance or markings of each miniature, which cannot be done at a glance. Sometimes, each miniature is assigned a card listing its individual properties. Again, relating the miniatures to these cards becomes troublesome because it requires that the appearance or markings of the miniature be related to the writing or picture on the card. When players are opposite each other, as is often the case, the book-keeping becomes even more of a headache, as a card cannot be right-side-up for both players, and if the table is large enough, both players are not close enough to read the text at the same time.
Recently, miniatures have been introduced with features to help track such properties without paper. For example, Games Workshop of Nottingham, England produced a line of miniatures in the early 1990's with a rotating disk built into the base of each miniature that could track the value of a game property assigned to the miniature. The disk could be rotated by the thumb manually. Similarly, Wizkids LLC of Bellevue, Wash. produces miniatures that have a rotating base that indicates several game properties. The miniature is picked up, its top section held stationary in one hand while its base is rotated with the other. Like the Games Workshop miniatures, an internal disk labeled with various game values rotates within the base of the miniature; the “current” game value or values is indicated by the labeling on the section of the disk appearing at a window cut on the top of the miniature's base.
A problem arising with these new miniatures is the fact that there is a very limited amount of space on each miniature to use for property tracking. Fitting a large number of properties on each miniature is exceedingly difficult.